Betsy Fullbright keeps hearing someone outside, or down the hall, call out yoo hoo. The television seems stuck on a program where people are burning flags. A goat seems to have been left out on the lawn and there may be a leopard prowling nearby. Meanwhile, the retirement home staff have vanished and most everyone else is away on a picnic. A silent black man, who arrived the night before, now sits in a wheelchair and stares at her. Could this be someone she knew once upon a time in Kenya? Did this person somehow follow her here after all these years? A haunting, deeply compassionate play. With a beguiling mixture of playfulness and brutal honesty, Russell Davis explores the truths of culpability that often lurk just beyond our conscious reach. -David Strathairn Russell Davis imagines the peaceful, even dull, domain of a contemporary retirement home. In THE DAY OF THE PICNIC, Julius Nkumbi pays a visit to Betsy Fullbright, a visit from her past in a distant land, a visit full of foreboding and hope. Quietly, spookily, Julius conflates past and present, a mysterious and sinister physical presence that brings today’s violent headlines into historical perspective and immediate reality. That he’s confined to a wheel chair only enhances our sense of his powers. Julius suggests a world in which our sense of the ‘real’ has little meaning and less effect. The play creates that world and its geographical and metaphysical borders poetically, in dramatic action, without lecturing, or preaching, or rhetoric. As spectators we’re brought into a weirdly real confrontation with a deeply alien sensibility. Julius Nkumbi, without fanfare or mumbo jumbo, rolls into Betsy Fullbright’s hitherto safe and satisfied life, forcing her to rethink that life and her self. And, entering her life, he enters our own, inviting us to do our own rethinking. -Abigail Adams, Artistic Director, People’s Light & Theatre Company
